November 2008

First Impressions: Gears of War 2

November 8, 2008

Like many of you, I spent all of last night mowing down locust in Gears of War 2. The first title was stellar in every respect and Epic has followed up with a game that exceeds it’s predecessor in many ways.

Graphically the game is gorgeous and it delivers a top notch experience. The locust AI on even the normal difficulty will make you second guess the notion that these characters are driven by the game and not some other human player. This delivered a top notch single player experience.

I’ve got big plans to head out into the realms of multi-player tonight and I suspect that even my grandest expectations will be surpassed by what Gears of War 2 delivers. If you are sitting on the fence, don’t hesitate to head out and pick this one up.

We’ll have a full review in the coming week, but don’t wait for that before making the decision to pick up Gears of War 2.

Fallout 3

November 6, 2008

Reviews / Xbox 360 / by Paul Bishop /

Fallout 3 begins in Vault 101, a place that is all you have ever known. Born and raised there, you were brought up to believe nothing exists in the outside post-nuclear world and that you will die in the Vault as everyone has done for generations before you. All of this is thrown into chaos the day your father escapes; your entire world is turned upside down as you must leave the Vault and enter the barren Capital Wasteland where mutations roam and life is kill or be killed. Armed only with the weapons you manage to find, you set out to find your father and head on a path that will shape the nation as you make friends and enemies along the way.

The world is huge. Playing in the future post-apocalyptic Washington D.C. is intense and gratifying; whether you are looking at destroyed National Monuments in the background, searching the Metro stations or museums for loot, there are plenty of secret locations to explore and enemies to encounter. Scattered through this world are the wasteland survivors living in communities or out in the world where they are under the constant attack of ghouls, super-mutants, raiders and mercenaries. Each have their needs and their schedules that add to the desperate feel the game atmosphere strives for, and how you interact with them affects your overall karma value. Here you have yet another way to customize your gameplay, as you can constantly take the high road by being nice to people or to strive for the way of the gun, killing people recklessly to achieve your ends. Each karma level of bad, neutral or good affects how people ultimately view and interact with you.

Fallout 3 takes the best aspects of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and smartly tweaks the formula to create a worthy successor in the Fallout series, using FPS mechanics as a base and adding a quasi-turn-based RPG system to the mix that further expands the player’s choices in approach. Using the Vault Assisted Targeting System (VATS), you can pause the action with a button push and focus on an individual targets body parts to maximize the damage. Each shot can be planned using Action Points (AP) to target the head, the gun arm or any other part as you attempt to take down your enemy or disable them. Each enemy requires a different approach, as you may want to quickly take down a raider by consecutive head-shots that cause more damage, but have a higher chance of missing or by aiming at a super-mutants gun arm so that you are less likely to receive their big-gun bullets in your face. All of this requires some tact though, if you use up your AP you are put back in to FPS mode where you may waste more ammunition and need to wait until AP is built back up to use VATS again. One nit I could muster about this system is the unfairness it sometimes trips upon; I have killed more than one mutant scorpion by blowing up its tail, and killed more than one raider by destroying their gun arm. These are just minor divergences from a game that excels in creating a living breathing world with a driving story.

Each quest offers multiple methods of resolution; you could use your charisma skill to talk your way on to the next step, or you could sneak in at night and hack a computer, or you could just kill the person and steal his key to gain the same information. In fact, there are whole sections of the main quest line that could be skipped if you just went to the next location and picked up the trail of your father. How you approach is completely up to you.

Fallout 3 is based around choices, and never before has a system of choice been implemented as effectively as it has been here. Any playstyle is welcome here, and ensures no two people will experience the game the same way. Anywhere that Fallout 3 fails to get a Game of the Year award is sure to face numerous comments and letters to the editor from Gamerdom’s howling denizens.

ESRB: M for Mature, for gruesome slow-motion head explosion animations

Plays Like: The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion with guns, but the VATS, leveling system, and other impressive achievements mean you could like this even if you didn’t like Oblivion

PROS: Deep story, excellent leveling mechanics and fun combat

CONS: May be too deep for some due to a vast, intimidating world

Midnight Club: Los Angeles

November 6, 2008

PS3 / Reviews / by Justin Last /

Racing games are difficult. Track design, opponent AI, and event variation all need to be handled very well because if any one thing isn’t right the entire experience falls flat. Fortunately, Midnight Club: Los Angeles delivers a great replica of the Los Angeles area and a good variety of race events. It stumbles, however, in its single player gameplay because of overly aggressive rubber band AI and opponents who always have the money for upgrades and the ability to beat you off the line when real vehicle stats say they couldn’t.

Midnight Club has never been about realism, though, and Los Angeles is no exception. The replica of Los Angeles isn’t a perfect street for street translation, but the experience is better for it. LA is, by and large, boring to drive in. By compressing the city a bit Rockstar was able to get recognizable landmarks closer together and create routes that are more exciting to race on than the city’s primarily grid-based layout should warrant. Second, vehicle handling lands closer to arcade controls than simulation controls. The big difference here is handling. You’ll be relying more on slides than precision braking to execute turns.

Midnight Club: Los Angeles conveys an incredible sense of speed. Nowhere is this more apparent than in pickup highway races. You can speed up to a potential opponent, flash your lights, and take off down the highway while weaving through traffic. The high speed feel can make it easy to miss the plumes of smoke that denote event start locations, but the in-game GPS view more than makes up for it. When you bring up the GPS instead of bringing up a menu with a simulated GPS screen the camera zooms out to a bird’s eye view of the city and lays GPS information over it, with all effects from the game world are translated to the GPS view – including weather.

It pays to learn the courses as events start at random places on the city map instead of preset tracks chosen from a menu, and until you learn the routes you can count on missing turns and losing races because of it. After you learn the routes you can count on losing races because the AI is absolutely brutal. Regardless of what the AI is driving, it will be better off the line than your top-of-the-line sports car, and it will never lag very far behind. Midnight Club: Los Angeles makes you work for your victories, and it definitely isn’t for the easily frustrated or the chronically unlucky.

Where Midnight Club: Los Angeles really shines is in its multiplayer. Rockstar takes full advantage of the current crop of console’s online capabilities and offers standard races, capture the flag keep away, and many more. Getting into an online match is simple, too. Taking a page from GTA IV, all multiplayer is handled via the cell phone. Either invite your friends or accept invites on the in-game phone, and you’re ready to participate in events with your buddies online. Occasional pop-in was observed during 16-player multiplayer, but it only happened once, and it certainly didn’t make the races less fun.

Midnight Club: Los Angeles is a great racing game with just a few little sore spots. The cars handle believably, Los Angeles is a blast to drive around in, and the GPS menu is amazing. Earning enough reputation to unlock parts for purchase is a good system in theory, but the punishing AI serves to frustrate a bit, and it gets even more frustrating the further into the game you get. Thankfully the online multiplayer is great and fair, since a skilled player can actually pull ahead of the pack and a minor mistake doesn’t guarantee a loss. Fans of street racing are certain to have a great time speeding around Los Angeles, but don’t expect to come in first right off the bat.

ESRB: T for Mild Suggestive Themes, Mild Violence, Strong Lyrics – no worse than a Need for Speed title

Pros: great GPS, authentic sense of speed, fun multiplayer

Cons: especially difficult single player

Plays Like: Need for Speed, Test Drive Unlimited

World of Goo

November 5, 2008

PC / Reviews / by Matthew Gallant /

With the rush of highly anticipated titles being released this fall, it would be a true shame if World of Goo got lost in the shuffle. While lacking the advertising budget of many of this season’s megahits, World of Goo has been championed by enthusiastic gaming press, indie game developers and PC gaming apologists. Add my voice to the chorus, because World of Goo is a terrific achievement that overflows with creativity and humor.

The crux of the game involves building fantastic functional constructs out of titular goo. The player must drag and drop the goo adjacent to two other goo ball vertices, which will snap new edges into place between them. These connections can bend and eventually snap, as you might expect a viscous material would.

The puzzles in World of Goo involve transporting the goo to a distant pipe. This is accomplished by building a structure towards it with as few goo balls as possible. The game begins with fairly straightforward puzzles: build a tower, bridge a gap, circumvent an obstacle. While the solutions require creativity, flexibility and lateral thinking, there is typically only one correct strategy for each puzzle. The only written instructions consist of cryptic clues from the enigmatic Sign Painter. The player is therefore required to discover the fundamentals of goo construction on their own. For better or worse, it’s impossible to proceed without learning things the hard way. Fortunately, the rules that govern World of Goo are logical and consistent.

Once the player has a firm grasp of the fundamentals, the creativity of the game really begins to shine through. The game introduces a menagerie of goo varieties. Bamboo-like green goo can be repositioned, pink goo balloons float, red goo is flammable, and many more. These new species build seamlessly on the existing mechanics, and introduce fascinating new challenges. Best of all, while the fundamentals always carry over, there is very little strategic overlap between levels. The player must constantly adapt, reevaluating old ideas and developing new ones.

The strong mechanics and puzzles are backed by beautiful cartoon-like art direction. Backgrounds are painted with broad strokes while people and objects have exaggerated proportions, not entirely unlike a Dr. Seuss book. There is a fair variety in the music, but every tune had a “magical factory” vibe to it that was actually rather grating after a while.

The game has a loose story told via short cartoon cut-scenes between levels. It’s cute and has nice anti-corporation and anti-consumerism themes, but is ultimately forgettable. Much stronger is the writing presented within the levels themselves. The messages from the mysterious Sign Painter are both humorous and helpful, reminding me quite a bit of the notes left behind by Dungeon Man in Earthbound. There are also some fantastically nerdy inside jokes hidden in the level names and descriptions, especially in the final world.

It’s tempting to let indie games off the hook sometimes due to their constrained development conditions. With World of Goo no such disclaimer is required; it’s a truly accessible, brilliant, and innovative game. Furthermore, 2D Boy went the extra mile in customer service by releasing the game on all three major operating systems (Windows, OSX, Linux) and completely DRM free. World of Goo is without a doubt one of the must-play titles of this fall.

Plays Like: The Incredible Machine

Pros: Challenging creative puzzles, accessible gameplay, innovative goo physics, delightful cartoon graphics, strong humorous writing

Cons: Music can be grating, learning gameplay fundamentals by trial and error requires persistence

ESRB: E for everyone; with no violence whatsoever, this is less offensive than a Disney game or movie

Company of Heroes to get second expansion in ’09

November 5, 2008

News / by Matthew Gallant /

THQ announced yesterday that a second expansion pack for the popular World War 2 strategy series Company of Heroes is in development by Relic Entertainment. The new entry is named Tales of Valour, and will be arriving for the PC in Spring of 2009. The game will feature new campaigns, maps, units and multiplayer modes. It also boasts a new “direct-fire” feature that will increase the player’s level of tactical control.

While the Second World War has become a staple of first person shooters, Company of Heroes managed to make the setting look fresh again with its fast-paced tactical combat. The first expansion Opposing Fronts built effectively on the original, and answered many criticisms by including an entire campaign set from the perspective of the German Panzer Elite division during Operation Market Garden. Perhaps the next expansion will explore the Russian front or the East African campaign? We’ll find out this Spring.

Check out the full press release here.

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